If you find yourself travelling frequently you may be all too familiar with the endless time spent in airports and bus stations waiting for the next leg of the trip to begin. These places can often be far from comfortable. Thankfully several items exist to make your time spent travelling as painless as possible. Consider some of these helpful products if you wish to maximize your enjoyment of time spent traveling.

Tablets

Tablets provide most of the capabilities of a laptop without the size or bulk. Are you tired of squinting at your phone screen to stream video and tv while you wait in the airport? Consider getting a tablet. These handy devices offer increased battery life over laptops and better performance and handling than smart phones. While name brand tablets such as Ipads, Kindles, and Notes can run you several hundred dollars a piece many companies offer cheaply priced tablets that can handle streaming and internet browsing with relative ease. Consider a tablet if you find yourself with downtime in public.

Wireless headphones

If you are frequently using your electronic devices to stream video and listen to music you are no stranger to how frustrating ear buds can be. These factory standard headphones seem to get tangled the second you take them out of your ears and try to store them. Thankfully a solution exists! Many companies offer wireless headphones that produce excellent sound quality. Simply charge them up before your trip and you should have 8 to 12 hours of listening time before they die out. You no longer have to fight with cords and wires! Shoot on over to Groupon Goods Consumer Electronics for their selection of wireless headphones to view their amazing deals and coupons.

Portable dvd players

Many companies offer a portable dvd player for under fifty dollars. These lightweight devices can be perfect for watching the discount dvds that are available for purchase and rental in many airports, gas stations, and rest stops. Portable dvd players are perfect for children who you don’t fully trust with the financial responsibility of a tablet. Consider a portable dvd player if you are travelling with children or extended family.

2016 is here, and my oh my what a ride it has already been. With constant changes in the virtual and physical world, it’s setting up to be a major year for SEO companies. Today we are giving you a list of the latest SEO tips for your new client’s website proposal.

1. Social Content Is More Important Than Ever

Social media is here to stay. More and more of the SERP’s are giving more weight to these social profiles a booster to SEO. Many marketers and large companies are seeing the benefits of such a craze.

You will need to merge your SEO strategy with your social media in order to stay competitive in the coming years.

2. Videos Are Still King Of Content

Videos have long been the king of content. They are the best way to engage your audience and drive up conversions. In 2016, this is no different. But the SERP’s are beginning to take video content into mind when ranking a page. Google is now reporting that 62% of all searches online are now video related.

Not only should you rank your content as a webpage, but also as a video, as more and more searches are bringing merged results with webpages and videos.

3. Mobile Optimization Is No Longer Optional

Your website should already be optimized for mobile. Global network traffic coming from mobile phone is now passing 15% and 4 out of 5 users are now using their mobiles to shop.

If your site is not mobile friendly, google will simply not put it in the search results on a mobile device. You must have a mobile optimized site.

4. Voice Search Function Is Required

Modern users are coming around to the idea of voice search. When out and about it is much easier to give a voice command then have to type things in manually. With the advent of voice activated assistant like Siri and Cortana, voice searching is becoming a day to day trend.

5. Content Aggregation Is Growing

Users are starting to expect to find a massive amount of information in one place. 85% of searches are now made up of Wikipedia, maps, social media, news, images and videos. It is becoming more incentivized to aggregate a wide range of content on your website.

6. Mobile Apps Are Continuing to Grow

52% of all time spent on mobile devices is done using an app. This can range from user to user, but people are finding an app for certain content and sticking with it. Most large websites now prompt users to download their apps and you should be doing the same.

7. Local SEO Is Paramount

Since the Pigeon update, google has started giving prominence to local searches and SEO over a broader term. With 50% of mobile searches being used to find out information about local sites, it should now be the focus of the SEO efforts. Especially for small business.

Off-page optimization is a strategy which has been subject to much change throughout the past few years. Whilst it has traditionally been focused towards directly improving keyword ranking predominantly through the use of link-building schemes, the introduction of Penguin put an end to many of the traditional forms of off-page optimization and resulted in the practice evolving and developing an array of new techniques. Here are some of the most useful and important off-page SEO techniques which you should definitely use for the best results.

Social Media Engagement

Building and engaging a community on social media is becoming an increasingly more essential technique for off-page SEO. With the purpose of off-page SEO constantly leaning towards building and managing online reputation, there is a definite growing need to embrace social media as a digital marketing tool which is legitimate, valuable and extremely effective. Good digital marketing agencies such as Baldyne are fully aware of the importance of using social media marketing for SEO. Social media marketing means more sharability, better interaction with your customer base and increased link building opportunities.

Local Search

Recently, local SEO techniques have become more and more important for business owners. Google are currently on a massive drive towards local search, and for some time, search results on both desktops and mobile devices have been influenced by location, especially for queries where local intent may not be explicit, using IP addresses, mobile network location data or GPS in order to automatically bring up results which are geared towards geographic location by default. A strong local presence can help to increase brand exposure, bring customers to your door and help you to achieve maximum search results real estate.

Customer Reviews

Listing sites are not only important for building links back to your website, they are also crucial for customer reviews, a factor which is becoming more and more important to off-page SEO. For any online and even offline businesses, customer reviews are a hugely important consideration for an off-page optimization strategy, and can even be a vital component of a marketing strategy. A positive review of your company or brand can certainly help to instill confidence in new users and contribute as an important ranking factor for local search. Recent surveys indicate that around 88% of customers trust online reviews just as much as personal recommendations.

Getting Link Building Right

Despite a number of changes being made, link building is certainly not dead and is still a hugely important part of any good off-page SEO strategy. However, it’s important to understand that link building is only truly effective when done right. Ensuring that you prioritize quality over quantity, build natural links, and use a variety of external sources will help you get the best results from your link building strategies. At all costs, poor-quality links and manipulative keyword and anchor techniques should be avoided.

Off-site SEO is hugely important to your website’s search engine rankings and is often directly tied to marketing. By following the right techniques and keeping up to date with the latest SEO trends, you’ll be able to see the best results.

One of the surest ways to stay relevant and get high rankings is through the uploading of fresh content. But how does one know whether Google has crawled their website, or even if the search engine knows their website exists? Confused yet? Well the Google cache checker tool is available to help.

Advantages

Before getting into the benefits, it is important to understand exactly what Google cache is and what it does. Google cache is simply a screen shot of a webpage, which is normally stored by Google. Every time the search engine crawls a webpage, it backs up the site’s screen shot. When a user conducts a search, it is this cached version of the site that the search engine uses to decide whether the search matches with the keywords. The search results listings will therefore contain cached versions. When the user clicks on these links in the results page, they are taken to these stored cache versions instead of the real site.

The cache checker tool

Every time the website is cached, there is a record that remains of that activity. When one traces the previous cached versions of their websites, they can then be able to know just how much the search engine crawls them. If the website does not have a cached version, this is a definite clue that it is not getting as much attention from Google or from potential visitors. However, this is not always the case as sometimes Google does not crawl the site because of penalties.

Advantages

The Google cache is basically a temporary version of the website. A website that has been cached has several advantages. For instance, if the site is down temporarily or if it is taking too much time to load, normally these problems are not transmitted to the user. They can still access the information they need from the screenshots.

Traffic and penalties

Perhaps the most important advantage is the fact that from checking the cached versions, one can very easily determine the level of traffic and activity that goes towards their site, and just how frequent the activity is. It is also a magnificent way of determining whether there is something wrong with the site. Sometimes sites are not cached because of penalties by the Google algorithms.

New information

When one uploads new information of their site, it is important to understand just how the much of an impact the information has made. After uploading information, the search engine cache checker can help determine the popularity and usefulness of that information.

Text version caches

These versions are almost always mostly overlooked, but are some of the most important in the SEO world. The importance of text should not be underestimated, and the text version cache helps users see the text just how Google might have seen it. With this text cached version, one can confirm whether the text elements are in the right order, whether the links are visible and other smaller elements like the effective use of header tags or how effective the text has been in interpreting the images.

Web design is a tough field to master, especially if you’ve only just started out. There’s so much to learn and so many different ways to solve one problem that you could easily get lost in the details. In addition, some of the biggest brands set a bad example for beginners, making things that are otherwise wrong seem acceptable. There are many things that could be said in that regard, but these are some of the most common web design errors being made today:

1.Pop-ups and modals

You know this: you follow a link to a page and before long, a giant modal popup covers the content. It is more than a little annoying, because you’re accessing that page solely to get to that article/post. There is nothing to be gained by redirecting your site visitors to anything other than what they’ve come to see. Once they’re done with the article, they’ll click around and explore other aspects of the site.

Now, modal windows are quite useful for a number of scenarios, such as allowing customers to fill in a contact form while on the current page before going back to their tasks. We’re not saying that you shouldn’t have any modals at all; only that placing them as the first thing seen on a screen seems desperate and annoying. If you must place a sign-up modal, you can have it show up at the end, when a user has read through the content they came for.

2.Building Walls of Text

Thebest thing about web design is that it empowers you to mix up various elements – text, images, videos etc. – to create a wholesome and interactive experience for site visitors. As such, you do yourself no justice by building an entire website full of blocks of text like an information pamphlet or brochure.

If you’re trying to market a business or product, don’t accost a visitor with huge blocks of text in the start page. Instead, make you homepage simple and to-the-point, including links that will allow visitors to delve further into whatever portions they like. Another option, where long expanses of text are unavoidable, is to break them down into smaller chunks with headers and illustrations so a customer can easily scan through.

3.Skimping on space

This is a common mistake among most web designers, especially when starting out. You may feel the urge to fill a webpage with interesting stuff and information for users to click on. This is compounded by poorly spacing the elements so that everything looks like a cluttered mess with no specific direction.

Human beings love simplicity, and a better idea might be to guide them through a journey on your webpage, providing information and stuff as they become relevant. You can do this is various ways, but ensure that all information is grouped near related design elements, with sufficient space in between. Proper usage of space can be hard for a beginner, but you can use typography and grid frameworks in tools like Foundation and Bootstrap to guide you until you’re conversant enough to invent the aesthetics yourself.

Author bio:

The author is a qualified web designer with over ten years’ experience in web design and development, currently working with YouthNoise. He is also a published author who has shared many articles on various online sites.

For SEO practitioners link building is perhaps the most important task of their endless endeavor to drive up the ranking of the website in the SERPs. It can be an extremely expensive process to acquire links that point back to your site from websites that have a good standing. You surely do not want to waste your SEO budget by committing mistakes that can be avoided with a little attention to detail. Some of the most common link building mistakes that you can dodge:

Not Checking Backlinks for ‘Nofollow” Attribute

Because Google algorithms still smile on sites exchanging links, SEO practitioners lay a great amount of focus and energy in trying to attract backlinks from reputed sites and sites that are considered to be authorities in their domains. However, the entire process can be extremely costly because it can be quite difficult to attract genuine natural backlinks, and you might have to shell out cash for the pleasure. The problem arises when after you have paid for a link; it unexpectedly disappears, leaving you high and dry. You should make it a point to inspect all your backlinks to verify that the links are present and they have not been tagged with a ‘nofollow’ attribute, making them completely useless for SEO.

Not Verifying the Quality of Anchor Texts

It is natural to feel excited when you get a link from a site with a good status but you should really investigate whether the anchor text is of the quality that will get you results. For example, you are in trouble if you find anchor text like “Click here” because Google really doesn’t like it at all. Any internet marketing company should try and endeavor to get the keywords included in the anchor text because without them the value of the backlink is greatly diluted. It can be a tough job to check out the anchor texts of a large number of backlinks manually, but luckily you have tools that can do the job for you. To find out more about what anchor text to avoid it is best to consult with a competent Utah SEO services company.

Not Getting a Text Link

Because webmasters often work under a lot of pressure they can skip details such as availability of anchor text when posting backlinks and use attractive images instead. While undoubtedly an image backlink can get you a lot of visitors, especially when it is of high quality and attractive, there’s nothing really like a good quality text link with anchor text to boost your SEO. However, in case an image link is the only feasible option of getting the desired backlink, don’t reject it but instead try and make sure that your keywords are contained in the image’s ALT text.

Not Keeping Your Backlink Focus

As per Google’s algorithms, it is very important that not only the site from where the backlinks are being obtained is of good quality but more importantly it should have a high relevance to the site that it is pointing back to. For example, if you are administering the SEO of a finance site, getting backlinks from a dating site is not going to do much for you. The good thing is that unless you site is extremely niche, it is possible to locate a huge number of websites that can qualify to give you backlinks.

Backlinks from Web Pages That Spiders Cannot Crawl

While a link may appear as completely legitimate inasmuch that it has anchor text with keywords and “nofollow” attribute is also absent, it may still be a dud simply because the search engine spiders cannot discover it. It may happen due to a variety of reasons such as lack of link exchange reciprocity; links on dynamic pages or pages that cannot be indexed by Google due to a bar by robot.txt. You should definitely make it a point to periodically check whether the links can be accessed by web spiders. While doing this manually could be a pain, a tool that simulates spiders can make it effortless.

Since links are vital for getting superior page rankings it is recommended that you pay attention to the quality of the links being acquired, and also to keep on monitoring their effectiveness with tools that are freely available.

Author bio: Jim Henderson is a senior consultant at a leading internet marketing company. He frequently coordinates with a reputed Utah SEO services agency to boost the page rank of his website in Google and other leading search engines.

When you have opened your Google chrome browser, have you come across some unwanted toolbar on the top of your page? Sometimes the unwanted malware comes suddenly without any warning. These malware will decrease the speed of your browser at its worst. But luckily, within a few minutes, you can restore your browser in a pleasant condition.

Now, How They Are Actually Coming?

These programs with issues are not intentionally installed by the hijackers or any kind of trickery. For example, you must have noticed the Ask search toolbar opens by default combining with the Oracle Java. These features are unimportant as the users can easily obtain search bar features elsewhere. Simply by typing within the address bar, you can create a short cut to social networking sites like Facebook.

Every time the Java needs an update, the boxes already remain checked. The users will have to remember to uncheck the boxes. By mistake, if you ever forget to uncheck the boxes, then removing that unwanted toolbar will surely become your nightmare!

Java bundles can therefore become a junk program to you. If you want to maintain your browser properly, start doing a wellness checkup on a regular basis. Though, you are not being attacked by the malware, the check up will help in preventing them.

Reset Settings Of Chrome:

The key configuration options can be customized and can be taken back to the original state. The default settings will help in the clearing the settings of the home page which can become your New Tab section. The home page button from the toolbar can be removed. You must clear up the new tab page, cookies, site data, startup data and the installed themes and extensions must also be removed. The Google chrome browser hijackcan therefore be prevented by clearing the unwanted extensions. You can click on the ‘settings’ option from the menu of Chrome and can choose the ‘show advanced settings’ from the three horizontal lines. Finally choose the ‘reset browser settings’ for performing the resetting functions.

Scan Malware:

If you have installed any anti-malware software, you can easily identify the programs that are hijacked by your browser. All your anti-spyware and anti-virus tools must be updated frequently to ensure an entire scan in your desktop or laptop. If you cannot detect anything, you can use utilities like Microsoft Safety Scanner for running an additional scan without disturbing the security applications.

Third Party Applications and Extensions:

The main reason of browser hijacking can be the usage of third party applications or extensions. If you can disable some add-on features from the extensions, you can easily get rid of the troublesome software from your system. You can reset the browser by selecting ‘extensions’ from the ‘Tools’ menu. You can also uninstall a program from the control panel of the computer to remove unwanted applications from the system.

Uninstall And Reinstall:

For clearing the malware from your computer, the uninstalling and the reinstalling functions will be very helpful. After performing these functions, you will be ensured about running the most updated versions of chrome. When you have performed the resetting functions and could not identify any effect, you can uninstall the program from the control panel. Finally, reinstall the program from the Google Chrome website with their latest released versions.

You must be aware when you get the message ‘installed by a third party’. This means that you have not installed the program and it can definitely be a malware or a spyware. Though they often attack without a warning, you must remain safe by checking up all the issues and clearing up the unwanted themes and extensions.

Author Bio: Parker Jones is a software programmer. In this article, he speaks about Google chrome browser hijack and the different ways to get rid of it.

You no doubt have enough on your plate running your company without experiencing the added problem of power cuts. Unfortunately though, it is impossible to rule out the risk of mains electricity failures, and warnings from one organisation suggest that the danger of these outages may be set to rise this winter.

Calls for an increase in capacity

The Industrial Communities Alliance (ICA), which represents 60 local authorities, has suggested that the recent closures of a number of large power stations in the UK has increased the risk of electricity shortages this winter. In a briefing document, the group called on the National Grid to act now to fill the energy supply gap by issuing new contracts to help generate an additional 2,500 megawatts of capacity. It also asked ministers to reconsider the current level of carbon taxes.

The ICA noted that a number of major plants, including Rugeley, Longannet and Ferrybridge - which were online in winter 2015-16 - will not be fully operational by the time the next cold season arrives. About this, the organisation remarked: “The problem - and it is a problem for every electricity consumer in the country - is that if all these closures go ahead, there won’t be enough generating capacity to keep the lights on next winter.” This could mean that demand for backup diesel generators and other standby power solutions rises over the coming months.

In its briefing document, the ICA also suggested that other coal-fired power stations, such as Ratcliffe, West Burton, Aberthaw and Drax, may soon be proposed for closure.

The potential impact on your company

In response to the comments made by the ICA, the government issued reassurances that extra capacity has already been secured for next year. However, it is important to consider what would happen if electricity supplies to your company were suddenly cut. After all, the capacity of the National Grid isn’t the only variable that can impact on power supplies. Flooding to substations and damage to power lines caused by high winds can also result in unexpected electricity failures.

If your company suffered a power outage, your operations may grind to a halt. In turn, this could have disastrous consequences in terms of your bottom line and your reputation. So, to give yourself added peace of mind that you would be able to cope in such circumstances, it’s vital to have a backup plan in place. For example, by investing in a diesel generator that meets your firm’s power requirements, you can ensure that even if the mains network fails, you will still be able to carry on functioning.

You might not have control over the National Grid, or over the weather, but by including backup power provisions in your business’ disaster recovery plan, you can prevent outages from disrupting your operations.